A Short History of USP

or

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Research

This is a brief history of how scientists at the research facility of a
major oil company conceived and developed a seismic processing system on
unix to serve their research needs in the areas of signal analysis and
wavefield imaging, how they persevered in the face of organizational politics,
and how they ultimately triumphed to the benefit of both research and seismic
exploration. As you download and unpack FreeUSP please take a minute
to read our history... It sketches a journey important to us and
it recognizes a number of valued colleagues along the way. In its modest
way it tries to imbue FreeUSP with a little of the human element.

Like most major oil companies Amoco had its own internal proprietary
processing system. Amoco's Seismic Information System (SIS) developed
over a period of many years starting in the mid-1960's when digital seismic
data started to be routinely recorded in the field and when large mainframe
computers became available to process those data. The genesis for
the digital seismic processing revolution however pre-dates this period
by more than a decade. It actually began with Norbert Wiener and
a visionary energetic group of students at MITs Geophysical Analysis Group
(GAG). If Professor Wiener provided the seeds for revolution Sven
Treitel and Enders Robinson provided abundant fertile soil for them to
grow. These two pioneers led the way laying the framework for digital
data processing, including band pass filtering and the concept of the layer
cake earth model and prediction error filtering. This digital tool
kit provided the foundation of every subsequent proprietary processing
system.

By the early 1980's SIS had grown into a vast centralized system of
some 300 individual programs serviced by an army of programmers.
Each program expected data input from digital magnetic tape and wrote data
to the same medium. The data processing center had a vast tape library
and hordes of sneaker clad carbon based units to rush tapes to and from
the phalanxes of tape drives. The whole operation took up several
floors of a large office building and in Amoco's case was duplicated at
several locations around the world. As SIS grew and as exploration success
became more dependent on data processing modifying programs or adding new
ones based on research became more onerous. Custodians of SIS mutated
into guardians - almost a priesthood - entrenched in conservative
practices. Changes in programs required traversing a bureaucratic
labyrinth with a mean travel path measured in months. A year or more
might elapse before a new program found its way through the system of coding
specs, coding, testing, documentation, and certification. This led
to a data processing system that was very stable but incredibly lethargic
to change. Portability of this system and its cousins in other exploration
companies was another huge problem since much of the code tended
to be specific to one vendor's hardware - good for the vendor, bad for
the user. For Amoco porting SIS to the Perkin-Elmer machines, then
with better price/performance, was a project of epic proportions, very
little of which actually advanced the state of the art of the tool kit
but certainly provided employment for legions of twinkie consuming professional
programmers.

During this time fundamental research into digital signal analysis and
wavefield imaging continued. The Robinsons and Treitels in turn produced
a new crop of students eager to turn their ideas into practical results.
At Amoco's Tulsa research facility a number of these scientists gradually
grew frustrated with the disconnection between research and production
data processing: trying new algorithms on amounts of seismic data large
enough to be considered part of the exploration process. By the mid 1980's
this desire to wed signal analysis research and seismic interpretation
became paramount. At that time happy circumstance provided one of Amoco's
first unix boxes, an HP9000 with 3mb of memory, three cpu's, and 400mb
of disk. The machine was part of a purchase to provide the core of
a system to process digital acoustic log data in real time in the field.
It quickly became apparent that the unix operating system was an ideal
framework upon which to build a more general data processing system, one
that was disk oriented relying on the unix structures of stdin, stdout,
and stderr to handle data flow from one independent process to another.
This contrasted with several vendor systems of the time which were essentially
giant fortran wrapper programs which built a data processing flow by linking
desired object code into a single runtime program. The premise was
that only the fortran (and later the C) compiler could be relied upon to
be portable across hardware. Such systems tend to be very finely
tuned making contributions by a loosely knit coterie of scientists with
disparate coding skills problematic. As the unix tide of popularity
surged across a sea of hardware vendors USP was born in the summer of 1985.

The original gang of four were Don Wagner, Paul Gutowski, and Martin
Smith, all Amoco research people, and Prof Bob Herrmann of Saint Louis
University, then acting as a consultant. Within a year the system
comprised about 50 programs and was capable of processing most 2D seismic
data sets from field tapes to final interpretable stack. USP quickly
demonstrated that scientists who were not primarily computer programmers
could rapidly implement ideas and test them on significant quantities of
data. Also it became clear that such a system, relying upon unix
for its infrastructure, did not require people intensive maintenance and
in fact could be kept alive and growing by just a few cone headed scientists.
The system was then adopted by other research groups within the Amoco Tulsa
geoscience community. During the late 1980's several varieties of
unix boxes became available - Sun, Cray, DEC, IBM - and so considerable
thought went into design of a makefile system that would support network
connection of multiple architectures. Leading this effort were Martin
Smith, Terri Fischer, and Joe Wade. As USP continued to develop it
was aided by the efforts of Amoco's seismic imaging research group -
MBS - which contributed many of the tools used to migrate seismic data.
Leading scientists at the time were Dan Whitmore, MaryAnn Thornton,
Sam Gray, and Gary Murphy. At this point some adventurous and rebellious
geoscientists in Amoco's office in Cairo saw the potential for addressing
severe noise problems in data recorded in the Gulf of Suez by a system
that so intimately combined research, data processing, and interpretation.
Paul Garossino, Mike Bush, and Dennis Yanchak developed a highly effective
methodology for reducing obscuring noise that was within weeks implemented
within USP and quickly made available in production mode. This development
had a major impact on exploration success in this area. It also had
a major impact on Paul's career who became so enamored of the USP concept
that he abandoned his exploration career for one in research joining the
Seismic Signal Analysis group permanently in 1990.

The early 1990's saw troubled times for USP which for all its technical
success and acceptance by research scientists ran afoul of Amoco's corporate
IT managers, who saw it as a variance in their efforts to implement a one
size fits all standard in data processing. The efforts to kill USP
lasted several years and were not dissimilar to efforts almost two decades
earlier of AT&T managers attempting to kill unix itself. The
USP crew even proposed giving the system away in some public fashion but
Amoco management at the time refused. The illogic of trying to kill
USP on the one hand while refusing to part with it on the other provided
an interesting philosophical backdrop to the war weary scientists trying
to do research. What ultimately saved USP within Amoco was a growing
user community in the exploration offices who saw their jobs made more
effective by the powerful data analysis capabilities of the system combined
with the very rapid turn around of new ideas into functioning tools.
This trend was facilitated by a training frenzy over several years during
which more than 100 Amoco geoscientists attended a four day USP class taught
by Garossino and Gutowski. Another major boost to USP came from Amoco's
New Orleans office which in 1993 led by technical geophysicist Mark Truxillo
decided to exclusively use USP as its internal processing system, quickly
demonstrating its technical effectiveness and economic impact. At
about that time Amoco's strategic applications technology group led by
Craig Cooper saw opportunities presented by USP for plugging into research
much earlier in the development cycle and enhancing his group's vision
of staying ahead of the technology curve thus giving Amoco's exploration
efforts competitive advantage. By the mid 1990's USP included a fully
functional 3D processing capability built around Amoco's legacy core 3D
system. It also included some multicomponent processing tools.

By the mid to late 1990's USP was firmly established within Amoco as
the system of choice for deploying new technology. During this time
the USP crew included scientists James Gridley and Greg Partyka and computer
analysts Marilyn Miller and Jacquie Vinson, as well as Paul Gutowski, Paul
Garossino, Don Wagner, and Joe Wade. USP now included sophisticated
seismic attribute technology and cool tools to access data directly from
interpretive workstations such as GeoQuest, Landmark, and Charisma.
Now an interpreter could graphically build a USP flow utilizing many cpu's
over the network and stream his data through it depositing the results
directly into his workstation for subsequent interpretation. Supported
architectures included Suns, HPs, Cray/UNICOS, Convex, IBM/AIX, SGI, DEC,
and PC/Linux. The tool kit now had some 400+ programs and was capable of
processing any digital data, including gravity, EM, and medical images.

When BP and Amoco merged in 1999 a strategic decision was made to retain
USP and a core group of scientists familiar with its use. BP scientists
quickly became users and developers and the future of USP became more of
a sure thing. Our post merger crew now includes Paul Garossino, Paul
Gutowski, Don Wagner, Ganyuan Xia, Greg Partyka (all signal analysis, petrophysics,
or imaging specialists of various vintages) and Joe Wade and Bryan Helvey,
our systems gurus. In 2000 the USP guys again raised the issue of some
kind of public release of USP. The motivation was to enhance BPAmoco's
technical reputation, to provide scientists and students in academia with
a fully functional development and processing system, and in the spirit
of open source distributions aggregate the contributions of other scientists
into the system. This request was met with enthusiastic support of
management and initiated a year long effort on the part of the USP crew
(in addition to their regular work load) to ready the system for release
as part of FreeUSP. What you the downloader have in your hot little
hands is the fruit of many scientists' research efforts spanning almost
half a century from the dawn of the digital revolution. We thought
it also important to tell you something of the story of USP.